Seeking the meaning of Love… {PHILOS}

We are capable of so much more than the kind of love that is exemplified during the month of February.  We’re capable of loving different individuals in different ways…

It is the “love between friends. Friendship is the strong bond existing between people who share common interest or activity.”  It is “the least biological, organic, instinctive, gregarious and necessary…the least natural of loves – our species does not need friendship in order to reproduce – but to the classical and medieval worlds the more profound precisely because it is freely chosen.”

C.S. Lewis explains in his book The Four Loves, that “true friendships, like the friendship between David and Jonathan in the Bible (1 Samuel 20), are almost a lost art. Lewis goes on to say, ‘to the Ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it’ “. (Source)

I’m afraid that Mr. Lewis is quite right, for modern society often does not develop relationships as friendship or companionship as deeply as generations past.  The love and appreciation of fellow man has been taken for granted in modern society and cannot be fully understood as it was in the day of David and Jonathan since so few actually experience true friendship.

A clear example of this can be seen by simply logging into Facebook.  Think of the number of “friends” that you have on there.  We have through this avenue, lessened the impact of the word “friend” itself.

We have also allowed our busy schedules to come between us and our true friends.  We say that we do our best to “fit them in” to our weeks, but do we actually take an appropriate amount of time to let these people know just how much they mean to us and how they have helped to shape our lives?

• Make a collage of some of your favorite pictures of times you spent together through the years.  Or put together a scrap book with funny captions under each image.  Learn how to do this digitally through Picmonkey.

No. 2 – Tell Them

• Resurrect the art of letter writing or sending greeting cards.  Send a personalized, hand-written note to your friends for Valentine’s Day.  It may be the only card they receive and seeing that you took the time to write a special message will mean so much more than a text message or Facebook comment ever will!

No. 3 – Spoil Them

• Invite your friend out for the evening and let them choose how to spend the evening.  If they’re not great with making choices, give them a list of some of their favorite things to do to choose from.  Be sure to pick up the tab for at least dinner.

Whatever it is that you decide to do, reach out to your friends and make it known just how important they are to you.

“We’re all a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutual weirdness and call it love.” – Dr. Seuss